It’s the first panel of the morning at Shaking It Up. Six men from six companies give brief overviews of their products. The session is led by Courtney Soderberg from theCenter for Open Science, which sounds great. [Six panelists means that I won’t be able to keep up. Or keep straight who is who, since there are no name plates. So, I’ll just distinguish them by referring to them as “Another White Guy,” ‘k?]

Riffyn: “Manufacturing-grade quality in the R&D process.” This can easily double R&D productivity “because you stop missing those false negatives.” It starts with design

Github: “GitHub is a place where people do software development together.” 10M people. 15M software repositories. He points to Zenodo, a respository for research outputs. Open source communities are better at collaborating than most academic research communities are. The principles of open source can be applied to private projects as well. A key principle: everything has a URL. Also, the processes should be “lock-free” so they can be done in parallel and the decision about branching can be made later.

CERN is partnering with GitHub. “GitHub meets Zenodo.” But it also exports the software into INSPIRE which links the paper with the software. [This
might be the INSPIRE he’s referring to. Sorry. I know I should know this.]

Overleaf was inspired by etherpad, the collaborative editor. But Etherpad doesn’t do figures or equations. OverLeaf does that and much more.

Publiscize helps researchers translate their work into terms that a broader audience can understand. He sees three audiences: intradisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and the public. The site helps scientists create a version readable by the public, and helps them disseminate them through social networks.

Q&A

Some white guys provided answers I couldn’t quite hear to questions I couldn’t hear. They all seem to favor openness, standards, users owning their own data, and interoperability.

[They turned on the PA, so now I can hear. Yay. I missed the first couple of questions.]

Github: Libraries have uploaded 100,000 open access books, all for free. “Expect the unexpected. That happens a lot.” “Academics have been among the most abusive of our platform…in the best possible way.”

Zenodo: The most unusual uses are the ones who want to instal a copy at their local institutions. “We’re happy to help them fork off Zenodo.”

Q: Where do you see physical libraries fitting in?

AWG: We keep track of some people’s libraries.

AWG: People sometimes accidentally delete their entire company’s repos. We can get it back for you easily if you do.

Q: Mr. GitHub (Arfon Smith), you said in your comments that reproducibility is a workflow issue?

GitHub: You get reproducibility as a by-product of using tools like the ones represented on this panel. [The other panelists agree. Reproducibility should be just part of the infrastructure that you don’t have to think about.]

Ethan Zuckerman has a great post that begins with a recounting of his youthful discomfort with the way the CEO of his early social media company, Tripod, was treated by the media as if he had done it all by himself.

Hearing me rant about this one too many times, Kara Berklich, our head of marketing, pulled me aside and explained that the visionary CEO was a necessary social construct. With Bo as the single protagonist of our corporate story, we were far more marketable than a complex story with half a dozen key figures and a cast of thousands. When you’re selling a news story, it’s easier to pitch House than Game of Thrones.

This leads Ethan to discourse on the social nature of innovation, and to a brilliant critique of Steve Jobs the person and the book.

My personal TL;DR: Geniuses are networks. But, then, aren’t we all?

Bonus: Ethan includes this coverage from Nightline, 1997. This is what the Internet looked like — at its best — to the media back then. (Go to 2:36 for Ethan his own self.)